Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Over $100,000: That's How Much Big Finance Rips You Off
AlterNet | Lynn Stuart Parramore | 07/28/16

New research shows that the average U.S. household loses over $100,000 to destructive activities of bankers and financiers.

America's financial system is broken for all but a few at the top; that much is plain. The rest sense that we are stuck on the minus end of some great financial formula, but given the complexity and size of Big Finance, it's hard to pin down exactly why it happens and how it all adds up.

Enter economist Gerald Epstein of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has dived in and crunched the numbers, and the results are eye-popping. Epstein and his colleague Juan Antonio Montecino look at exactly how families, taxpayers and businesses get ripped off by dubious financial activities and tally up the costs in a new paper for the Roosevelt Institute, "Overcharged: The High Cost of Finance." ... Read more

TYT | Hillary Clinton Democratic National Convention Speech. TYT Analysis (07/29/16) [26:23]

A Transgender Woman Just Made History at the Democratic National Convention
MotherJones | P.R. Lockhart | 07/28/16

On the final day of the Democratic National Convention, Sarah McBride used her position as the first transgender person to speak at a major-party convention to argue that despite advances in LGBT rights, the fight for equality must continue.

"Will we be a nation where there is only one way to love, only one way to look, and only one way to live?" McBride asked the audience, which included the largest transgender delegation in convention history.

The 25 year-old Delaware native, who is the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, made headlines in April after she posted a photo of herself from inside a women's bathroom in a government building in Charlotte, North Carolina, defying a controversial state law that mandates people use the bathrooms that match the biological sex they were assigned at birth. ... Read more

And Now: The "Closest, Nastiest, Most Unpredictable" Campaign You Can Imagine
ZeroHedge | author | 07/29/16

America's about to endure the closest, nastiest, most unpredictable presidential election in more than three decades. Not since Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan ran against each other in 1980 has the choice been so stark, the warnings from each candidate about the other so dire, the likely outcome so murky. As this year's political conventions end, there's no clear favorite. But watch the polls next week. The leader in the first polls conducted entirely after the convention ends has won the White House every time since 1948. ... Read more

Why Social Fragmentation Suits The Powers That Be
ZeroHedge | author | 07/29/16

Ours is an Age of Fracture (the 2011 book by Daniel Rodgers) in which "earlier notions of history and society that stressed solidity, collective institutions, and social circumstances gave way to a more individualized human nature that emphasized choice, agency, performance, and desire."

A society that is fragmenting into cultural groups that are themselves fracturing into smaller units of temporary and highly contingent solidarity is ideal for Elites bent on maintaining political and financial control.

A society that has fragmented into a media-fed cultural war of hot-button identity-gender-religious politics is a society that is incapable of resisting concentrations of power and wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. ... Read more

*Climate Change in Bangladesh (2016 ) [26:25]